Supernatural Progression

Reading Sci-fi At An Early Age Helped Alice Hoffman Evolve Into A Striking Fantasy Writer.

April 24, 2005|By Chauncey Mabe Books Editor

Magic happens when Alice Hoffman writes.

The prolific author of genre-straddling novels such as Practical Magic, Turtle Moon, The River King and the newly published The Ice Queen composes carefully crafted stories set in the real world, but elements of the supernatural tend to bubble up into her narratives.

"I don't plan it out, it just happens when I write," Hoffman says, speaking by phone from Boston. "My father left when I was 8, and he left his books behind, all fantasy and sci-fi.

"So I developed an affinity for sci-fi, fantasy and fairy tales as a child. It stays with you."

While Hoffman doesn't claim any significant supernatural experiences herself, she says she is "as open to the paranormal as I am to the way electricity works." Paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke, she adds that she believes little difference exists between magic and technology.

"That's a lot of what The Ice Queen is about," says the 52-year-old author. "The main character is hit by lightning, which can be a kind of magical experience -- provided, of course, you survive. Things happen that can't be explained."

In researching the novel, Hoffman came across plenty of anecdotal evidence of "uncanny" experiences occurring around people who have survived lightning strikes.

In The Ice Queen, a small-town librarian lives a life circumscribed by the early loss of her mother. To forestall further grief and pain, she has closed down her emotions.

After she's struck by lightning while visiting her brother in Florida, she embarks on a highly uncharacteristic affair, with another lightning-strike survivor. He's so hot -- literally -- they must make love in water lest he burn her flesh.

For a fiction writer like Hoffman, of course, metaphor trumps factuality every time.

"We are struck by the lightning of a trauma and everything changes afterward," Hoffman says.

"Lightning" of this sort struck Hoffman in 1998, when she learned she had breast cancer, a disease that also afflicted her mother and a sister-in-law. Another sister-in-law had just died of brain cancer.

"I was absolutely terrified," Hoffman says. "You get this call telling you, and it's very surreal."

Over the course of a year, Hoffman went through chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. She has now survived past the magic number -- five years -- and says she "seems to be fine."

"During the treatment I was writing The River King and it really saved my life," Hoffman says. "I went from the futon to the computer. It was a dreamy existence of living half in the book. For sure, reality was not a place I wanted to be."

Hoffman discovered, or rediscovered, how important writing is to her.

"Writing is a life raft, and that's something that people have with reading, too," she says. "It's a way to escape from reality, but also to enrich reality. Especially when things get terrible."

Like many serious writers who use elements of the fantastic in their work, Hoffman bristles at any hint of being categorized. She doesn't want to be called a popular writer, a women's writer or a fantasy writer.

"I feel very comfortable with fantasy and sci-fi," Hoffman says, "but why is Singer and Marquez not considered fantasy, while Bradbury is? There's a tendency to arbitrarily assign people to genres."

Likewise, she says, when she's called "a women's writer" it's usually meant in "a derogatory way. Do you ask Russell Banks if he's a man's writer? It's a put-down, intended to limit you."

While it worries Hoffman that far more women than men read fiction, she says she can count plenty of men among her readers.

"Fiction is good because it goes to scary places, subconscious places," she says. "And I think it's sad that so many men give that up. Fiction is emotionally challenging. It's good to be intellectually challenged, but it's better to be emotionally challenged."

And that, Hoffman believes, is the secret to her success.

"I'm a thinking writer, but the best novels are those that make me feel," she says, "those that enable me to know something I didn't know, to feel something I haven't felt. To cry and learn something about my life. Emily Bronte does that for me in a major way."

Hoffman's popularity can also be ascribed to her storytelling abilities. Her books tend to have a clear narrative arc, filled with characters who suffer and change. "That's a big part of why people read," she says.

"I have a terrible attention span and if a book doesn't get me on the first page," she says, "well ... life is too short. You've got to get the reader right away, right from `once upon a time.'"

Hoffman regards herself as a literary writer who happens to sell a lot of books because, she says, she always writes for herself, not for an audience.

"I don't consider myself a commercial writer at all," she says. "I'm really writing the book that comes to me. I do tell stories that people want to hear, but mostly I'm writing about emotions and characters that are meaningful to me."

Chauncey Mabe can be reached at cmabe@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4710.